Window on War - Ffenestr RyfelIn Art this week, we have created montages on the theme of 'War'. A montage is a piece of artwork that appears to have many layers. Unlike a collage, though, in a montage the layers have been drawn and the final piece of artwork is 2D. First we looked closely at a selection of World War 2 artefacts such as an evacuee's suitcase, bullet shells, a gas mask, an ARP warden's torch, ration books and identity cards. We used pencils to make careful drawings of them, shading different tones to capture areas of light and shade on the artefacts.

We practised 'overlapping' drawings.

Next we practised the skill of drawing artefacts so that they looked like they were overlapping each other. The objects in the foreground had to be quite simple and large.

Shading in the background with pastels.

We worked hard on our final montages. On A3 paper we drew our WW2 artefacts, taking care that they appeared to overlap. We then used a coloured pencil to shade our drawings. We had to choose one colour only. We thought carefully about our choice of colour and its symbolism - red could represent danger, green could represent peace, blue could represent coldness or calm, and yellow could represent hope. Once the foreground drawings were complete, we used pastels to shade in the background. The pastels had to be shaded and blended carefully with our fingers.

Layering emotive words on our montage work

The final stage was to cut out emotive words from newspapers to complete the layers of our montage. We chose words that linked to our World War Two theme, for example, BOMB, DESPAIR, TRAGEDY and HERO. We placed these words on top of our artwork in suitable positions. We hope you enjoy looking at our gallery of montage artwork below. Rydyn ni'n gobeithio eich bod chi mwynhau edrych ar ein oriel isod.

You created a lovely montage, Cara-Mae using some great images of war. I liked the way your drawing of an ARP warden's helmet overlapped other images. You also used some emotive words from the newspaper as part of your montage. We will display these montages in the classroom.

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lucy

1/11/2013 02:12:47 am

i loved making the world war things because it was so fun

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Mr. Evans

1/12/2013 06:06:43 am

Your montage was really effective Lucy. You worked so hard at drawing and shading the war motifs and you chose some emotive words to place on the montage.